Three Open Source Tricks For Old Media Dogs
Adopting Open Source Could Save The Dying News Paper Industry
Popular print media outlets are dying. It doesn’t matter if you’re a small town rag or the world’s best-known brand, progress doesn’t discriminate. How bad is it? The New York Times (which owns the Boston Globe and many regional papers) owes $400 million more than it has on hand. Both the Detroit News and the Detroit Free Press are limiting home delivery to 3 days a week in what they’re trying to spin as a “bold transformation” (read going out of business). Newspapers are leaving the Associated Press. The 137-year old Columbus Dispatch is cutting cost by cutting content.
So is this the end of the paper route? In 10 years will news papers only be available in museums and Aunt Agnes’ basement? What Superman will swoop in to save the Daily Planet?
None.
If newspapers want to survive the next five years, they’re going to have to adapt, period. Here are three things those old media dogs can learn from open source.
Free your content and revenue will follow.
Newspapers should adopt the Creative Commons license. It’s a proven model that works, and it’s available. Creative commons would allow anyone to use the paper’s content for non-commercial purposes, while the paper retains copyright and gets proper attribution. It also allows people to modify the content as long as they share the changes they make with the paper and anyone else under the same license.
Think of the new opportunities for monetization and the boost to online content sharing. We’re talking about a new syndication model to drive direct licensing and ad revenues. Here’s a copy of the license, and the code to include it on your website:
<a rel=”license” href=”http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/”><img alt=”Creative Commons License” style=”border-width:0″ src=”http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-nc-sa/3.0/88×31.png” /></a><br />This <span xmlns:dc=”http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/” href=”http://purl.org/dc/dcmitype/Text” rel=”dc:type”>work</span> is licensed under a <a rel=”license” href=”http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/”>Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License</a>.
Dear Editor,
You should tailor this license for your jurisdiction and preferences. If you have questions, I’m sure the fine folks at Creative Commons would be happy to help you with all of your licensing needs. I’d ask you to donate to them, but you should wait until you pay your bills.
whurley
It’s not about content; it’s about community.
When I’m sounding the benefits of open source, one of my favorite lines is, “It’s not about the code; it’s about the community.” Newspapers should embrace their customers and start making content with them. They can reduce the cost of acquiring new content while producing content that’s more relevant to their readers. Readers will show the paper what they’d like to see covered, how they’d like to see it covered, and how they’ like it delivered if given the opportunity.
CNN seems to get this at a high level. They’ve created iReport.com, a site where user-generated stories are posted in a very open source format. I predict people will eventually appreciate getting something back for more valuable content. Note to the editor: build a graduated reward system for your top content producers.
Influence rather than control.
Just like the recording industry, newspapers need to learn the difference between control and influence. Opting for control at every chance is suicide. Stop force feeding and start soliciting content from your independent, tech-savvy audience. Create contributor communities. Set yourselves up as a well organized group of air traffic controllers, continually mentoring content contributors and pointing them in the direction of outlets that suit their content.
Newspapers influence is waning right alongside their revenues. No time for “wait and see.” It’s time to make a fundamental, evolutionary change to a business model that’s literally hundreds of years old. So all you editors, board members, and media-outlet owners out there, give me or any of the other members of the open source community a call. I’m sure plenty of us are willing to help you survive the next five years.
I’ve only offered three suggestions. Please use your comment to share your thoughts on what the print media might (or might not) learn from open source and social media. Hopefully your comments will spark some open innovation. Otherwise, we start telling stories about the paper boy riding his bike “five miles, uphill, in the snow, both ways.”
Here’s the problem:
“Unfortunately, I suspect we’ll see more budget cuts and staff layoffs over the next several years. It’s sad to see a vital industry go through such a painful transition as more readers abandon traditional print newspapers to go online for news,” says Patrick Phillips, an adjunct journalism professor at NYU and the editor and founder of I Want Media, a Web site that focuses on news media. “In addition to stealing away potential readers, many new media forms are also taking away newspaper advertising, especially classifieds. Not only are readers being stolen, so is one of newspapers’ primary sources of revenue.”
http://www.compu…asp?article=articles%2Farchive%2Fc0512%2F46c12%2F46c12.asp
So how do newspapers rewind the clock and beat Craigslist to the punch? Answer: they can’t. So they have to either outpunch Craigslist in the same weight class–which might be possible if they go small market, but seems unlikely–or they find a new weight class to punch in.
How do they replace lost classified revenue? That’s the question. They can continue to stay relevant as an influential news distributor, using your suggestions, but how do they stay profitable?
The real news gathering is what’s getting squeezed. Why not make the “investigative” and hard news operation into a separate foundation that publishes under a CC license (and can go after membership funding), then have staff of the remaining for-profit side do fluffy versions of their stuff for the mass market?
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It is rare that a business can make a transfer to a complete new business model. Most businesses fail…and from thoses ashes new businesses are reborn.
Two comments resonated: It’s not the content, it’s the community. You’re right, a directed community has tremendous value–it’s what we’re trying to build at elearningcouncil.com (and you can guess what that community is focused on). It has already provided value to the folks who participate. Does a non-focused community have the same value?
Any thoughts on what kind of rewards to provide content creators. That’s my biggest problem at ELC. It’s just a few folks who provide content…being a non-profit it’s hard to provide monetary rewards. We’re not getting enough contributed content to provide recognition based rewards.
Absolutely agree on the last two points (community over content and influence rather than control). News companies are making better progress on the community over content aspect than any of the other points here, but they still have a tough time letting go of control.
Great idea in point #1 on Creative Commons. I’ve thought for a while that news companies should deliver their content to work in any format or device, but I like the idea of extending that to allow for other to add and contribute.
It’s exciting to think of new business models for news companies. Some of the best opportunities lie in combining news coverage and community platforms, or in a reverse syndication model, where instead of charging for sending you my stories, I pay you a share of the ad revenue I get from traffic you send my way.
Sorry, Creative Commons will never happen w/ newspapers, and I don’t blame them. I write for traditional media, and it’s my job to bring eyeballs to a certain page so those eyeballs see ads. Creative Commons means you are using my content somewhere else, which means I don’t get those views. That sucks. I don’t need the backlinks.
BTW, Whurley, I happen to know for a fact that you still read traditional media. Why do we read traditional media? Because they have to be accountable. They have a reputation to uphold and shareholders to appease. I do believe journalists should be more accepting of user generated content, but someone needs to act as a filter for what is right and what is just crap. A lot of user generated content is useful, but some of it is just self-promotional noise. Why would I want to read that?
Traditional media should be much more accepting of interactivity and community, but creative commons would put a lot of people out of work. How about this: a newspaper puts up something like Qik on their site and says “Ask the Domain developers questions, live at 10 PM at http://www.newssite.com“. THAT’S interactive media and no, I’d never put that up under creative commons. That’s what traditional media has the power and influence to do, they just don’t do it for some reason.
Justin.tv is a good example of this. You can chat w others during a football game. It rocks. Again, traditional media is not doing this.
I compare it to making the movie “Star Wars” as a silent film in my blog post here:
http://www.michell…the-silent-star-wars
As an old-school newspaperman trying to transition into a modern media environment (see http://spot.us/pitches/39 for my foray into crowd-funded journalism), I certainly find a lot to think about here. Thank you for presenting these ideas.
The most interesting point, to me, is about community being more important than content. That seems to be true on a certain level. Note the Obama campaign, for instance. They got it that it’s no longer about donations per se, it’s about membership — belonging. But community ultimately is bankrupt and irrelevant to everyone outside the community unless there’s good content, too. If we don’t have anything to say, all of the jabbering signifies nothing. In some ways, allowing only the consumers to direct the coverage enables our natural but unhealthy tendency toward the sensational.
But for newspapers and other news organizations, money is still going to be the bottom line. And I don’t see a complete case here that explains how all of this makes enough money for papers. I would be greatly interested to read further posts along this line, though.
Three Open Source Tricks For Old Media Dogs…
Popular print media outlets are dying. It doesn’t matter if you’re a small town rag or the world’s best-known brand, progress doesn’t discriminate. How bad is it? The New York Times (which owns the Boston Globe and many regional papers) owes…
The Creative Commons licenses are well recommended because their use can increase readership and revenue. Free and paid models should operate in concert as a newspaper may publish open content while continuing advertising and paid subscriptions.
CC BY-NC-SA is preferable to “all rights reserved”, what about considering even less restrictive licenses? For example if the content can be republished for profit, that results in more readers of the material and a wider community. These are the most valuable assets, and so to remove more barriers to sharing and reuse it would be even better to publish under public domain dedication.
@Sanjay Nasta
A robust and active community brings more readers, and that is vitally important to authors.
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I’d have to agree with Michelle Greer on this one… if there’s no gatekeeper on the content, there’s no value.
Of course, dropping the gates would galvanize participation and greatly reduce the cost of content creation.
If you ask me, ESPN.com has the closest thing to a winning formula with their “insider” memberships. The premium content is always sexy, timely, and exclusive.
Unfortunately, no one is going to buy a membership to read timely bulletins about the latest city council proclamation.
However, local newspapers have something that ESPN.com doesn’t. They’re local. They’re right in the midst of it, seeing it happen, and they can interact with the community at any time. They’re part of our identity. Being mentioned in the local paper still means something. They can develop rich content that appeals to civic pride and touches on local issues; no one else will.
The implementation? That is an exercise left to the reader.
videogame writer guy
videogame writer guy Says:
> I’d have to agree with Michelle Greer on this one… if there’s no gatekeeper on the content, there’s no value.
OTOH, I’d say that having a gatekeeper does not necessarily imply value.
The value that news outlets offer is not merely information. You can get plenty of that on the ‘Net. The value is that such information is timely _and_ vetted _and_ available. A “community” of amateur news reporters might produce timely voluminous news, but when Joe Reporter says “casualty figure is in the 10,000’s”, do you believe him? Joe R. has nothing to lose if he’s sloppy in his news gathering and fact checking. As for availability: how about news on the Iraq war? Can one (or would one want to) count on amateur reporters for that?
Assuming that (time and vetted and available) news is of value and is what people want, news organizations need to adopt the “indirect revenue” model of other Web enterprises. Offer (time and vetted and available) news for free, which would result in eyeballs, which would translate to revenue. It works for Google with search and for Facebook, Myspace, etc. with social networking; it may also work for news.
[...] long-time open source advocate, used this as an opportunity to test his recent ideas on crowdsourcing and open collaboration, and quietly began work on a platform to bring the process out into the [...]